1 Brunelli, Bruno, ed., Tutte le opere di Pietro Metastasio, five volumes (Milan: Mondadori, 1953–1965)Google Scholar, volume 4, 802 (No. 1842, 12 February 1770): ‘Sappia che la scelta del soggetto è stata sempre per me fin'ora il più tormentoso passo de’ miei poetici lavori’. Unless stated otherwise, all translations are my own.

2 Metastasio's annotazioni di soggetti are preserved at the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna (Cod. 10279, fols 36–78) and transcribed in Brunelli, Tutte le opere, volume 2, 1279–1286.

3 Brunelli, Tutte le opere, volume 3, 85 (No. 55). The opera under discussion was most probably Demofoonte, which enjoyed its premiere in Vienna on 4 November 1733 with music by Antonio Caldara. Marianna Benti Bulgarelli detta ‘la Romanina’ (1684–1734) was the creator of the title role in Sarro's, Domenico Didone abbandonata (Naples, 1724)Google Scholar, the first setting of that libretto.

4 Brunelli, Tutte le opere, volume 3, 127 (No. 96, 28 May 1735): ‘Lavoro come un galeotto, onde al solito non sono di buon umore; ho la bile in moto, e per necessaria conseguenza ho poca voglia di scrivere. Mi volete aiutare a cercare un soggetto per un'altra opera, sì o no? L'ho da incominciar subito terminata quella che sto scrivendo: e per far bene, dovrebbe essere un fatto romano. Farei volentieri il Coriolano, ma quella vecchia b. [brutta?] g. [sic] della madre non mi accomoda in teatro. Farei gli Orazi, ma quel sorellicidio mi storpia. Il Muzio Scevola è stato qui rifritto non ha gran tempo. Gli Scipioni, i Fabi ed i Papirii hanno seccata l'umanità.’ The Muzio Scevola Metastasio referred to was possibly Giovanni Bononcini and Silvio Stampiglia's, as originally performed in Rome (1695) and revised for the Viennese Court in 1710.

5 Ars poetica, line 128, cited from Horace, Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica, trans. Henry Rushton Fairclough (London: Heinemann, 1955), 460.

6 Voltaire, ‘À Monsieur le Marquis Maffei, Scipion’, in La Mérope française, avec quelques petites pièces de littérature (Paris: Prault, 1744)Google Scholar, xxi.

7 Carlo ‘Farinelli’ Broschi's double appearance as Epitide in the Merope operas of Riccardo Broschi (Turin, 1732) and Geminiano Giacomelli (Venice, 1734) is a well-known instance here.

8 I borrow the term from Deshoulières, Christophe, L'opéra baroque et la scène moderne: essai de synthèse dramaturgique (Paris: Fayard, 2000), 94 Google Scholar.

9 Jommelli also created two versions of Apostolo Zeno's Merope (1741 and 1749) and Eumene (1742 and 1747, the latter entitled Artemisia). His Tito Manlio operas for Turin (1743) and Venice (1746) are based on different librettos by Gaetano Roccaforte and Matteo Noris (revisions by Sanvitale and Zanetti). There exist two comprehensive surveys of Jommelli's operatic career: Abert, Hermann, Niccolò Jommelli als Opernkomponist, mit einer Biographie (Halle: Niemeyer, 1908)Google Scholar, which dedicates pages 190–202 to a formal analysis of Cajo Mario; and McClymonds, Marita P., ‘The Evolution of Jommelli's Operatic Style’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 33/2 (1980), 326–355 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in which Cajo Mario is not mentioned.

10 See Vogler's comparison of Galuppi's, Jommelli's and Anfossi's settings of the aria ‘Se cerca, se dice’ from Metastasio's L'Olimpiade in the Betrachtungen der Mannheimer Tonschule (1778), 129–153.

11 For comparative analyses pertinent to Jommelli and mid-eighteenth-century opera seria see Ziino, Agostino and students, ‘Le quattro versioni dell’Ezio di Niccolò Jommelli’, in Musica e cultura a Napoli dal XV al XIX secolo, ed. Bianconi, Lorenzo and Bossa, Renato (Florence: Olschki, 1983), 239–265 Google Scholar; Bigongiali, Biancamaria, ‘La “Merope” di Apostolo Zeno nelle versioni di Jommelli e Terradellas: libretti e fonti musicali manoscritte’, Fonti musicali italiane 10 (2005), 39–84 Google Scholar; Balbo, Tarcisio, ‘L'aria “Che mai risponderti” nel Demofoonte del Metastasio nelle intonazioni di Gluck, Jommelli, Hasse e Galuppi’, in Johann Adolf Hasse in seiner Zeit: Bericht über das Symposium vom 23. bis 26. März 1999 in Hamburg, ed. Wiesend, Reinhard (Stuttgart: Carus, 2006), 155–164 Google Scholar; Forment, Bruno, ‘Jommelli's ‘Tenacious Memory’: Replications in L'Ifigenìa (1751)’, Studi musicali 38/2 (2010), 361–387 Google Scholar; and Antonella D'Ovidio, ‘Da Roma a Vienna: scelte drammaturgiche e compositive nelle prime due intonazioni della “Didone abbandonata” (1747, 1749) di Niccolò Jommelli’, in Niccolò Jommelli: l'esperienza europea di un musicista ‘filosofo’. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi (Reggio Calabria, 7–8 ottobre 2011), ed. Gaetano Pitarresi (Reggio Calabria: Edizioni del Conservatorio di Musica F. Cilea, 2014), 189–221.

12 Examples of such dissections are offered aplenty in Gjerdingen, Robert O., Music in the Galant Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; see in particular pages 315–331, where the Romanesca, Prinner, Cudworth and Jommelli schemata (the latter being ‘an intensified version of the Comma’) are indicated in a duet from Demofoonte (Stuttgart, 1764).

13 The conglomeration and concomitant diffraction of voices in Italian serious opera are examined in Reinhard Strohm, ‘Zenobia: Voices and Authorship in Opera Seria’, in Johann Adolf Hasse in seiner Epoche und in der Gegenwart: Studien zur Stil- und Quellenproblematik, ed. Szymon Paczkowski and Alina Żórawska-Witkowska (Warsaw: Instytut Muzykologii Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 2002), 53–81. Strohm contends that music analysts ‘are always only talking of the qualities of the work after the author has left it; the performative qualities or audience expectations which may have contributed to it or may have been lost in the author's plotting of the voices, remain lost in their analyses too’ (56).

14 Roland Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, Aspen 5–6 (1967), no pagination.

15 The spelling of Cajo with a j instead of an i follows the original libretto.

16 Letter of Farinelli to Sicinio Pepoli, Madrid, 26 August 1749, cited in Farinelli, Carlo Broschi, La solitudine amica: lettere al conte Sicinio Pepoli, ed. Vitali, Carlo (Palermo: Sellerio, 2000), 188 Google Scholar: ‘L'Eccellenza Vostra mi raccommanda il signor Iomelli, ed un pittore. . . . Per il secondo . . . mi risolvetti scrivere in Inghilterra al signor Antonio Iolli famoso nel suo mestiere e prattica nel Teatro, e già sta qui dipingendo nel Real Teatro con soddisfazione.’ (Your Excellency recommends signor Jommelli to me and a painter. . . . For the second . . . I resolved to write to signor Antonio Jolli in England, famous in his profession and in his theatrical practice; he is already painting here at the Teatro Real to our satisfaction.) Joli would be active at the Teatro del Buen Retiro in Madrid from 1749 to 1754.

17 Biographical accounts of the artist are offered in ‘Jolli, Antonio’, Enciclopedia dello spettacolo, ed. Silvio D'Amico, eleven volumes (Rome: Le Maschere, 1954–1968), volume 6, 780–781; Mastroviti, Anna Coccioli, ‘Joli (Jolli), Antonio’, Dizionario biografico degli italiani Google Scholar <www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/antonio-joli_%28Dizionario_Biografico%29> (23 January 2015); Toledano, Ralph, Antonio Joli (Modena, 1700–1777 Napoli) (Turin: Artema, 2006)Google Scholar.

18 Tiraboschi, Girolamo, Notizie de’ pittori, scultori, incisori, e architetti natii degli stati del Serenissimo Signor Duca di Modena con un appendice de’ professori di musica (Modena: Società Tipografica, 1786), 230 Google Scholar. Among Joli's scenographies for the San Carlo, there is a Cajo Mario (1770; music by Niccolò Piccinni) for which, unfortunately, no visual documentation has come down to us.

19 On Joli's set designs see Mancini, Franco, ‘Appunti per una storia della scenografia napoletana del Settecento: il periodo della decadenza (1762–1806)’, Napoli nobilissima: rivista di arti figurative, archeologia e urbanistica 2/4 (1962), 147–158 Google Scholar; Scenografia napoletana dell'età barocca (Naples: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1964); and ‘Antonio Joli: la transizione al neoclassico’, in Il Teatro di San Carlo 1737–1987, volume 3: Le scene, i costumi (Naples: Electa, 1987), 37–48.

20 See Mai, Ekkehard and Rees, Joachim, Kunstform Capriccio: Von der Groteske zur Spieltheorie der Moderne (Cologne: König, 1998)Google Scholar; Kanz, Roland, Die Kunst des Capriccio: Kreativer Eigensinn in Renaissance und Barock (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2002)Google Scholar; Steil, Lucien, ed., The Architectural Capriccio: Memory, Fantasy and Invention (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014)Google Scholar. The bonds between the capriccio, veduta and stage set are embodied in works by the many artists who excelled in all three genres (besides Joli, his teacher Giovanni Paolo Panini and Marco Ricci), or who made efforts to combine them (as Mazzi, Vincenzo did in his engraved Capricci di scene teatrali (Bologna, 1776)Google Scholar).

21 Toledano, Antonio Joli, 115–116. The (apocryphal) titles of the works are: Capriccio architettonico con personaggi orientali e veduta di costiera mediterranea, Capriccio con architettura di palazzo romano e personaggi all'antica and Capriccio architettonico. This last painting was previously owned by the Denver Art Museum.

22 The incident is reported in Plutarch, ‘Life of Marius’, in Parallel Lives, trans. Bernadotte Perrin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), 12.2, as consulted at <http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Marius*.html> (17 March 2015): ‘Marius came across the sea from Africa with his army, and on the very Calends of January, which with the Romans is the first day of the year, assumed the consulship and celebrated his triumph, exhibiting to the Romans Jugurtha in chains. This was a sight which they had despaired of beholding, nor could any one have expected, while Jugurtha was alive, to conquer the enemy; so versatile was he in adapting himself to the turns of fortune, and so great craft did he combine with his courage.’

23 Roccaforte, Gaetano, Cajo Mario: drama per musica (Rome: Rossi, 1746), 3–5 Google Scholar.

24 Further details can be found in Kildahl, Phillip Andrew, Caius Marius (New York: Twayne, 1968), 39–49 Google Scholar and 81–98 (Marius's triumph is discussed on page 97), and Sampson, Gareth C., The Crisis of Rome: The Jugurthine Northern Wars and the Rise of Marius (Barnsley: Pen and Sword Military, 2010), 32–41 Google Scholar. Marius's conquest of Numidia furnished the subject of an anonymous azione scenica composed by Scarlatti, Pietro, Cajo Mario in Numidia (Palermo, 1749)Google Scholar.

25 Roccaforte, Cajo Mario, 4.

26 Braccioli is first and foremost remembered as the librettist of Antonio Vivaldi's Orlando finto pazzo and Orlando furioso (Venice, 1714). His Calfurnia has been overlooked as a source for Cajo Mario. See Dorothea Link, ‘Caio Mario’, Grove Music Online <www.oxfordmusiconline.com> (25 March 2015).

27 Pseudo-Plutarch, Parallela minora, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 20, as consulted at <http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/Parallela_Minora*.html> (17 March 2015). Calpurnia's true age in 104 BC, the temporal setting of both Braccioli and Roccaforte's librettos, can have been six at the most, unless Marius adopted the girl or fathered a child before his marriage (in 110 BC) with Julia, the aunt of Julius Caesar who makes an appearance in Braccioli's drama, but not in Roccaforte's.

28 Plutarch, ‘Life of Marius’, 14.3–5.

29 Braccioli, Grazio, Calfurnia: drama per musica (Venice: Rossetti, 1713), 11 Google Scholar.

30 Kildahl, Caius Marius, 117.

31 Plutarch, ‘Life of Marius’, 14.7

32 Foligno (1747), Bologna (1751 and 1758), Modena (1752), Pavia (1752), Casale Monferrato (1753), Livorno (1754), Cremona (as Cajo Mario Romano, 1755), Faenza (1761), Siena (1762), Verona (1762), Barcelona (1766), Arezzo (1769), Cesena (1770) and Prague (as Il Cajo Mario Proconsole e Patrizio Romano, 1772). Two further revivals, in Florence (1747) and Barcelona (1752), are doubtful. My information on the reception of Cajo Mario is compiled in part from Sartori, Claudio, I libretti italiani a stampa dalle origini al 1800: catalogo analitico con 16 indici (Cueno: Bertola e Locatelli, 1991)Google Scholar, and in part from bibliographic data gathered in various Italian libraries.

33 Roccaforte, Cajo Mario, 26: ‘Se perde l'usign[u]olo / il caro amato bene, / sfoga col canto il duolo / così l'acerbe pene, / che giunge tra le selve / le belve a impietosir. // Voi pure il mio dolore / v'impietosisca, oh dei! / Pietà de’ casi miei, / pietà del mio martir.’ (If the nightingale loses its dear beloved, it unleashes its mourning in song. The sour pains thus reach the woods and arouse the pity of wild animals. Gods, may my suffering also arouse your pity for my fate and torture.)

34 The sole surviving score of the Viennese Merope pasticcio (1749), with contributions by Jommelli (A-Wn Mus. Hs. 17948/1–3), reveals a striking, hitherto unnoticed element: Gaetano ‘Caffarelli’ Majorana (1710–1783), the original creator of Trasimede (a secondary character) in Giacomelli's Merope, revived Farinelli's Epitide part in its entirety at the Habsburg Court.

35 Roccaforte, Cajo Mario, 18: ‘Atrio magnifico del Tempio di Giove con maestoso ingresso, che introduce alla parte interna del Tempio . . . con Ara in mezzo del sudetto Atrio con deità di Giove, e Giunone.’ (Magnificent atrium of the temple of Jupiter with a majestic entrance, leading to the internal part of the temple . . . and an altar in the middle of the aforesaid atrium with effigies of Jupiter and Juno; setting for Act 1 Scenes 6–12). The setting of Epitide's ‘Quell'usignuolo’, by contrast, was a ‘Montuosa con rocca nell'alto. Grotta nel mezzo, e Bosco nel basso’ (Mountainous range with rock up high, a grotto in the middle and woods below). See Zeno, Apostolo and Lalli, Domenico, Merope: dramma per musica (Venice: Marino Rossetti, 1734), 31 Google Scholar (stage directions for Act 2 Scenes 1–4). ‘Se perde l'usignuolo’ was retained in at least three revivals of Jommelli's opera for which I could consult the libretto (Bologna, 1751, performed by Orsola Strambi; Casal Monferrato, 1753, sung by Giovanni Triulzi; Barcelona, 1766, sung by Angela Catherina Riboldi as Marzia Calfurnia) and discarded in two further versions (Bologna, 1758 and Verona, 1762).

36 See Aeschylus's Oresteia (458 BC), parts two (Choëphoroi) and three (Eumenids), in addition to Sophocles's Electra (435–410 BC), Euripides's Electra (c413 BC), Orestes (408 BC), Andromache (428–425 BC) and above all Act 1 of Iphigenia in Tauris (414–412 BC). An eighteenth-century example worthy of note here is Prosper Jolyot de Crébillon's Électre (1708), Act 5 Scene 9.

37 Jommelli's Astianatte (libretto by Antonio Salvi) features two ombra scenes, albeit for different characters: in Act 2 Scene 15 Andromache perceives the dead Hector, while in Act 3 Scene 10, Orestes sees a fury. The ombra topos is surveyed in McClelland, Clive, Ombra: Supernatural Music in the Eighteenth Century. Context, Style, and Signification (Langham: Lexington, 2012)Google Scholar; see also the book's reviews by Rice, John in Early Music 41/4 (2013), 674–675 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and by Bushey, Sarah in Notes 70/2 (2013), 265–267 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Roccaforte, Cajo Mario, 48: ‘Che più tardate, o barbari / fieri rimorsi atroci / a lacerarmi il cor.’ (Barbarous, fierce, atrocious regrets, what are you waiting for to tear my heart apart?)

39 Roccaforte, Cajo Mario, 59: ‘Veggo un lume di torbida face, / odo l'ombra, che freme d'intorno.’ (I see the light of a troubled countenance, I hear the ghost that quivers around me; my italics.) Intriguingly, Jommelli would reunite the two motifs twenty-five years later, in Orestes's ‘Tardi rimorsi atroci . . . Odo il suon delle querule voci’ in Ifigenia in Tauride (Naples, 1771), Act 1 Scene 5. The vocabulary and the musical concept of that aria resemble Marius's two ombra arias, with the lyrical flow being interrupted to introduce what Marius describes in a recitative as the ‘raucous noise’ (‘rauco suono’) of ‘feeble instruments’ (‘flebili strumenti’) – namely, the woodwinds.

40 Roccaforte, Cajo Mario, frontispiece: ‘Dedicato alla Nobiltà e Curia Romana.’ The dedication of the libretto to a collective entity might of course also indicate the poet's failure to find an individual patron for his work.

41 Pseudo-Plutarch, Parallela minora, 20, <www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0219%3Asection%3D20> (24 March 2015).

42 Roccaforte, Cajo Mario, 10: ‘Un grand'esempio, / Annibale è per noi; Che se fra gli agi / Negletto non l'avesse in vil riposo, / Profittandone, forse / Avrebbe, avrebbe incenerita, e doma / Italia, tutta, il Campidoglio, e Roma. . . . Cepio, Sillano, / Manilio già sconfitti / Dals Barbaro furor del Cimbro altero / Piangon la lor sventura’. The inverted commas (virgolette) next to the original passage in Braccioli's Calfurnia, 15 (‘Ah mia figlia non vedi / Sparsi d'ossa Romane I campi? e a scorno / Del destino di Roma, / E Silano, e Manilio, e Cepio vinti?’) seem to imply that this reference was found too hermetic for a Venetian audience. According to Plutarch, ‘Life of Marius’, 12.4–5, Marius did triumph, and exuberantly so, thereby trespassing senatorial law.

43 See Kildahl, Caius Marius, 109. The primary sources on Marius's life are scrutinized in Van Ooteghem, J., Caius Marius (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1963), 7–45 Google Scholar.

44 For a complete overview of eighteenth-century operas on the Iphigenia myth see Strohm, Reinhard, ‘Iphigenia's Curious Ménage à Trois in Myth, Drama, and Opera’, in (Dis)Embodying Myths in Ancien Régime Opera: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Forment, Bruno (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012), 117–138 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

45 For a structural analysis of Jommelli's L'Ifigenìa see Bruno Forment, ‘“La Terra, il Cielo e l'Inferno”: The Representation and Reception of Greco-Roman Mythology in Opera Seria’ (PhD dissertation, Ghent University, 2007), 122–170.

46 Roccaforte, Cajo Mario, 31–32.

47 Text from the libretto of Jommelli's Bolognese setting, Metastasio, Pietro, Ezio: dramma per musica (Bologna: Borghi negli Orefici, 1741), 72 Google Scholar (Act 2 Scene 12). Jommelli renders the passage in recitativo obbligato. See GB-Lbl Rm22 F.4.

48 The various manuscript copies of this aria (for example, in B-Bc 5220, D-Dl Mus.1-F–28,13 and I-Nc 388) seem to testify to its popularity.

49 Plutarch, ‘Life of Marius’, 17.1–3.

50 See Roccaforte, Cajo Mario, 43–45 (Act 2 Scene 11).